the Cape. But from this time there was no longer any study of appearances; law, judges, and tribunals were ceremonies too circuitous and too tardy.

Meanwhile Rochambeau, who received in different detachments fresh troops, to the number of 20,000 men, sent them under different circumstances against the revolters, whom he drove away from the country around Port-au-Prince, Mole SaintNicholas, and the heights which overhung the Cape. As he was most eager to signalize his command by some victory, he retook Fort Dauphin and Port-de-Paix without any memorable action. This was the term of his success. The blacks without regret, abandoned fortresses which to them seemed contemptible in comparison with their rocks. But in the degree in which they were repulsed at one point, they extended towards another, so that they only acquired accessions of strength. But what was more for their encouragement and advantage, was that they were furnished with arms by English vessels. Rochambeau thought that there was no surer means to repress their ardour than to affright them by some extraordinary punishment.

The sea off the Cape was chosen to be the theatre of an execution, unparalleled in what is called civilized life. For fear that Maurepas, who had gained distinction under Toussaint L'Ouverture, after having embraced the side of France, should join the insurgents, Leclerc had written to him to come by sea, with his family and his troop, to take the command of the Cape, which he destined for him as a reward for his services. No sooner had he arrived than he and his soldiers were seized and disarmed. Rochambeau ordered preparations to be made for a barbarous punishment, in order to put the negro general to death, with his troop, consisting of 400 blacks. It was also put in deliberation whether death should be inflicted on his children, in order to prevent them from rising up to avenge their father.

After having been bound to the mast of a vessel, Maurepas was frightfully insulted. His wife, his children, and his soldiers were brought to be drowned under his eyes. The executioners were astounded when they beheld a father fix his dying eyes by turns on his children, his wife, and his companions in arms,

undergoing a violent death; while they, on their part, turned their eyes away from a father, a husband, a general, whose countenance was disfigured by the tortures he was enduring. After being made to contemplate each other's sufferings, they were all tossed into the ocean. They died without complaining, in a manner worthy the champions of liberty. With a reversal of the order of nature, the father died last; he also suffered most. Thus died Maurepas, whose character was a compound of frankness and severity. Thrice had he repulsed the French at the gorge of Trois-Rivières; he had at once the glory and the misfortune to go over to the French with victorious arms. The elevation of his soul equalled his valour. He preserved a tender feeling for the master whose slave he had been; he caused funeral honours to be paid to that master, and when his grave had been negligently prepared, he threw off his upper garment in order to perform the pious office properly. Among men of his own blood he was a powerful chief. A spirit of order and justice prevailed in his life. His riches, which were considerable, were given up to pillage. It would almost seem as if so much excellence were subjected to so much ignominy, expressly to show that while black men are capable of any virtue, white men are capable of any crime. Certainly, my narrative is replete with instances which, beyond a question; prove that moral as well as mental excellence is independent of the varieties of colour.

This brutal punishment, preceded by vile perfidy, filled the camps of the insurgents with horror. That horror was augmented when Rochambeau, at the Cape, put to death five hundred prisoners. On the place of execution, and under the eyes of the victims, they dug a large hole for their grave, so that the poor wretches may be said to have been present at their own funeral.

Dessalines burning to avenge Maurepas and his fellow-soldiers, rushed like a lion on the Cape, and, in his impetuous and terrible march, he surrounded and made prisoners a body of Frenchmen, who, at the post called Belair, defended the approach to the city. Then, with branches of trees, that ferocious African raised, under the eyes of Rochambeau, five hundred gibbets, on which he

Of these victims of

hanged the same number of prisoners. vengeance, the greater number had been the Consul's companions in arms; they had assisted that bad great man to acquire his pretensions to a throne, and for their reward they had been sent out of his way to suffer an ignominious and painful death at the hands of a savage.

Rochambeau, who occupied himself less and less with war, continued to plunge into the delights of the table, and of voluptuousness with courtezans and wives of colonists who never ceased to stimulate his tyranny, and exact from him the restoration of their slaves. Then, while the insurrection, in the name of liberty, made head in the mountains, on the plains suspicion converted everything into crime. If you went abroad, you joined the revolters; if you stayed at home, you were waiting for them; if you manifested joy, you took pleasure in the public calamities; if you appeared sad, you grieved over the reverses of the revolt; if you wrote letters, you corresponded with the enemy; if you talked, you spread sedition; if you were observed to listen, you were a spy; if you failed to salute a white, you insulted a master bravery was dangerous, weakness was complicity, innocence was stratagem. Interpretations were put on a gesture, a smile, a sigh; silence was accused of sedition, and even thoughts had no asylum in their last refuge, the human heart.

Such is the character of the tyranny which under the slightest pretext and often by mere hazard, threw its toils round a multitude of victims without distinction of age or sex, to effect their ruin. The number of sufferers was greatly augmented, because colonists by a species of rivalry denounced the peaceful slaves of other colonists, so that it became almost the sole business of Rochambeau to order or even to devise punishments; the sea and the land were covered with them. The unfortunate blacks were bound together and then thrown into the sea to perish: if they came up to the surface and made their way to the shore, they were in sport pursued and massacred. The executions were varied: now the blacks were beheaded, now they were dragged down into the depths by the weight of a shot tied to their feet; and now they were stifled by sulphur on ship-board.